Status Report - Week of 08 Sept 14

[SMoss 2101]

 

Focus for the development team over the last week has primarily been on resolving server and client crashes discovered during internal testing of 0.49. Rather than address the crashes with a potential hotfix after the update (given the impact of the associated central hive reset and the steps taken to address the more prevalent duplication and abuse methods) the choice was made to unlock the update from our regularly scheduled maintenance window of Wednesday and rapidly iterate upon experimental. 

What does this mean for the average chernarusian survivor? We will be pushing rapid updates to experimental and iterating 0.49 until the build is in a state ready for stable branch. We believe this will only be a matter of a few days. When the build is ready for stable branch we will work with our game server partners to bring stable branch offline, and update steam.

Additionally, the programming and design teams have been working together to investigate and resolve several key cheating and bug abuse methods including but not limited to:

• Server/Character force re-initialization
• Rapid micro player location updates (slide/glide teleporting)

Community interest in exactly how the northern regions of Chernarus will be developed has been ongoing, and after discussion with Senchi our Lead World Designer we've put together a rough guide for the development of these regions.

 

 As you can see looking at the map above, the environment team has a clear plan for developing the north and inland regions. When work on the northern corridor has completed the environment team will begin revitalizing existing legacy villages and towns throughout the map.  This means that once the villages and towns of the north listed in the above image are completed, the team will begin renovating the original Chernarus towns and villages to bring their look, feel, and layout more in tune with the reality of a post-apocalyptic world.

Lastly, this Friday will be the first of our now weekly dev streams on Twitch.tv. Head over to twitch.tv/dayz at 18:00 GMT +2 this Friday and members of the development team will be playing DayZ and answering questions from the chat.  -- Brian Hicks / Producer

 

Peter / Lead Designer

"This week there has been ongoing work on advanced weather impact, which is being expanded, partially rewritten and tweaked to provide better utilization and feeling. Also newly added mercury thermometer comes in hand if you are unsure about your body temperature. The prototype of the dynamic events system - the UH-60 gets company from the eastern camp, the well known Mi-8 helicopter. A few new items were added recently from the PAX showcase, such as the stun baton and balaclavas and they will be available for public in next experimental version. As well hunting will be expanded with the useful snare trap shortly.

We are currently focused on cleaning and redoing configurations for all doors as their handling was fundamentally changed in the game engine. Improvements which will be noticeable at first is the easier interaction with them - forget about nightmare which door to choose from action menu to open those you want to while you are standing near to more of them as now it takes into account what your cursor is aiming at and it's not proximity based. The second welcomed change is related to the audio side - sounds of doors opening and closing are possible now and are already plugged in and you can really tell difference. (Although the variation in sound effects are not quite there yet)

More sounds will come later for example for locked doors because with recent door improvements we can finally start working on barricading. We have already done some design outline and analysis toward barricading mechanics -  to allow you to take existing structures and occupy them for your needs. First thing to come will be (un)locking the door's lock with a lockpick which will be expanded with different padlocks and even combination ones. Later the wooden planks, nails and other material come to use in combination with tools which gain other purpose aisde from melee only.

Keep your ears open while looting... see you in Chernarus folks!"

 

Chris / Lead Artist

"Character Art

Since the last update, the biggest change with character art has come with the creation of a new base body type with is ~10% more slender than the previous. It is more fitting for somebody surviving in a harsh environment and will help reduce the number of clipping errors between clothing/player bodies. Because of this and recent changes to how characters are assembled and to their animations, we have been doing a lot of bug fixing. Unfortunately that means pausing the creation of new items by some of our artists to fix the worst of these issues immediately, however, we're mostly past this and will begin again on some new clothing “sets”. Work on reshaping other items to reduce the severity of clipping will be ongoing.

 

Weapons (or the AKS-74-and-U)

Many of you were happy to learn about the AKS-74U and many asked me on twitter and on the DayZ forum which caliber it will be chambered for.  Surely, we would not add a 5.56mm AKS-74U, right? I mean, they never *really* made a direct AK100-series equivalent for the AKS-74U after all.

 

Well, you'll be happy to learn we are, in parallel, working on art for 5.45x39mm ammo. In other news, The MP133s animations have been finished and are now pending sounds and the lever-action repeater is ready to deploy, following implementation by design. 

 

Vehicles

Friends, I am happy to report that we have officially begun working on the art for our first vehicle. Until this point, our working prototype has been an old vehicle from ArmA2 but now, we are working on a brand-new V3S with many of its components (i.e. wheels, doors, etc...) separated into different meshes to work in a similar manner as weapon attachments."

Standup Notes for the week of 08 Sept 14

Art:

• V3S Transport Truck
• New civilian zombie
• NEAF civilian hangar
• New 55-gal drum
• Derringer
• AKS74U
• 5.45mm ammo
• Radio Cassette player
• RGD2 smoke (white, black)
• Waterproof packable bag
• Waterproof backpack

Animation:

• Bugfixing
• Grenade, chemlight, flare related animations finished
• Repeater reload animations done
• Throwing animations in progress
• MP133 reload animation in progress
• Arming/Disarming animations polishing in progress

Design:

• bugfixing
• configs and scripts for new items
• added mi8 for random spawning
• advanced weather impact on player
• reconfiguring doors and adding sfx
• barricading mechanic outline
• ​finalizing new controls

Programming:

• Character and inventory items duplication fixing
• Melee combat tweaking
• Shotgun shooting over network fix
• Door reimplementation (now in internal testing and bugfixing)
• New gamecontrols
• Forced reinitialized players
• Desync issues
• Better sound over network
• Central economy (type related cleanup and respawn, dynamic tweaking)
• New basic zombie behavior
• ​Partial reworking of respawn / cleanup system according to required type-related implementation

[GonzaNKetchup 10]

Amazing job guys!

The door thing it's going to be super cool and silent hill-ish ! :) 
Thanks a lot for that! and for everything. dunno if it's allowed here to reply. but, anyways. everything seems to be on it's way! 

[fear91fin 27]

Awesome stuff... but no mention on horticulture, could it be ready for incoming update on experimental.

[WhiteZero 72]

Dem Standup Notes. Exciting stuff coming down the pipe. Thanks for the update!

[DeepEuphoria 69]

Vehicles...... Barricading Houses...... Dealing With The Teleporting Hackers...... :blink:

[mrmutant 13]

That AK74U :D :D now I can almost fully role play as a stalker. Gimme artifacts and bloodseekers hehe..

[darkrider400 76]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7y6kXwMo_M

 

^^^^^^That, except with vehicles!@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Of course, the devs are the dudes selling, and Im the one buying :P

Edited September 10, 2014 by Darkrider400

[hoik 415]

hahahaha yea ^

[JPWiser 251]

I'll believe it when I see it lol...

[hells high 676]

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

[mazymodz 10]

Could the Tisy military base be the traning camp for the CDF? I mean they need to trained somewhere...

[blackberrygoo 1416]

I just .... I can't .... I don't even know what to say , so much awesome freaking stuff in one page =) lockable doors and barricades mentioned , vehicle work beginning , filthy glitchers and hackers going away for a while and a whole lot of good little surprises :0 ! Great work dev team !

[☣BioHaze☣ 7337]

So much yes please, moar please!

 

[Silence4all 35]

Additionally, the programming and design teams have been working together to investigate and resolve several key cheating and bug abuse methods including but not limited to:

• Server/Character force re-initialization
• Rapid micro player location updates (slide/glide teleporting)

 

That is some of the best news yet!

[d.walker43 196]

sounds great! I have 1 concern though. why is the first vehicle going to be a military vehicle? I was under the impression that it would be a bike, atv, or small civilian car. something that will be common. military vehicles are going to be rare. so why is the first vehicle in the game going be one of the uber-rare ones? doesn't make much sense to me.

[St. Jimmy 1631]

V3S is a classic civilian truck also and not just a military vehicle. I also wondered why it is a truck and not something like Lada.

[C0bbler 17]

sounds great! I have 1 concern though. why is the first vehicle going to be a military vehicle? I was under the impression that it would be a bike, atv, or small civilian car. something that will be common. military vehicles are going to be rare. so why is the first vehicle in the game going be one of the uber-rare ones? doesn't make much sense to me.

I believe they did the M4 early on as a way to nut out the tricky stuff with guns. Probably just following the same idea with vehicles.

[Rags! 1966]

I would really like to see the player count raised but have spawn points be located all over the map. Maybe after they make the North section of the map playable my dream will come to fruition.

[Papanowel (DayZ) 34]

V3S is a classic civilian truck also and not just a military vehicle. I also wondered why it is a truck and not something like Lada.

 

They were talking about 2 vehicles if I red this correctly ;)

 

An old one from A2 (did not mention the name) and the new one which is a V3S made from scratch.

Edited September 11, 2014 by Papanowel

[deniz0790 42]

Reading/Seeing the plans for the north of the map, i've got some thoughts about that ...

 

I really hope they will be expading the map to the sides for some more wilderness with maybe some lonely houses like hunting huts/firewatches ...

Thinking about trying to find a spot for a hidden base, the plans for the north give me some worries about the urbanisation, if u can say that, of the whole map.

There should really be more room for players that want to stay a little away from civilization, live off the land, only going into towns if they really need to or want to have some player interaction...

Devs, i really hope you have that in mind for the future... kind of miss the vast nature in the north from the original arma 2 map, i used to love the great distances between some of the towns, gives u a feeling the map is really big. Loved that since OFP in 2001.

Don't get me wrong i love the new cities, i would just like to have that nature back somewhere else, maybe in the direction north of the pass at the northern end of the map ...

Edited September 11, 2014 by SpawnZ

[deniz0790 42]

They were talking about 2 vehicles if I red this correctly ;)

 

An old one from A2 (did not mention the name) and the new one which is a V3S made from scratch.

 

They were talking about 1 vehicle, the other one from arma 2 was just a work in progress model for development until they could replace it with the V3S that they talked about .

[komadose 190]

Vehicles

Friends, I am happy to report that we have officially begun working on the art for our first vehicle. 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAAAA YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

 

 

after the vehicles hit the street, it's time for me to return to DayZ.

[Papanowel (DayZ) 34]

They were talking about 1 vehicle, the other one from arma 2 was just a work in progress model for development until they could replace it with the V3S that they talked about .

 

Ok, I misread then :)

[Hicks_206 (DayZ) 4297]

I would really like to see the player count raised but have spawn points be located all over the map. Maybe after they make the North section of the map playable my dream will come to fruition.

 

Honestly the only thing holding an increase in player count back is server side performance. (Think tick rate for the simulation) I'd personally like to see us focus on 0.50 hitting server side optimization, but this will need to be discussed with the leads, and more specifically Mirek and Fido from the programming team.

[HIHBGaming 14]

Honestly the only thing holding an increase in player count back is server side performance. (Think tick rate for the simulation) I'd personally like to see us focus on 0.50 hitting server side optimization, but this will need to be discussed with the leads, and more specifically Mirek and Fido from the programming team.

 

Mmmm server side optimizations. That would be brilliant!